Kennedy's Brain

by Henning Mankell

  'What makes you think that he was murdered?'

  'There is no other explanation.'

  'Did he have any enemies? Had something happened?'

  'I don't know. But why else should he die? He's twenty-five years old.'

  'We don't know. There's no sign of any assault.'

  'He must have been murdered.'

  'There's no indication of that.'

  She continued to insist. Somebody must have killed her son. It was a crude, brutal murder. Göran Wrath listened, notebook in hand. But he wrote nothing down, and that annoyed her.

  'Why aren't you writing anything?' she suddenly yelled in frustration. 'I'm telling you, something must have happened!'

  He opened his notebook, but still wrote nothing down.

  At that very moment Artur came into the room. He was dressed as if he had just come home after being out hunting in heavy rain and trudging for ages through endless swamps. He was wearing wellington boots and the old leather jacket she could remember from her childhood, the one that smelled so pungently of tobacco and oil and goodness knows what else. His face was pale, his hair tousled. She leapt to her feet and clung tightly onto him. He would be able to help her out of this nightmare, just like he did when she was little and crept into his bed after waking up in the middle of the night. She told him everything. There was a brief moment when she was convinced that everything had been a figment of her imagination. Then she noticed that he had started crying, and Henrik died for the second time. Now she knew that he would never wake up again.

  Nobody could console her any longer, the catastrophe was total. But Artur forced her to carry on telling him, he was determined in his despair. He wanted to know. Göran Wrath appeared once again. His eyes were red, and this time he did not even take his notebook out of his pocket. Artur wanted to know what had happened, and it seemed that now he was present, Louise dared to listen to what the police officer had to say.

  Göran Wrath repeated what he had said before. Henrik had been lying under the covers, wearing a pair of blue pyjamas, and had probably been dead for at least ten hours before Louise discovered him.

  The most obvious thing was that nothing appeared to be unusual. There was no sign of a crime, no sign of a struggle, no break-in, or a sudden attack or anything else to suggest that anybody had been in the flat while Henrik had gone to bed and passed away. There was no farewell letter to indicate suicide. The probability was that something had burst inside him, a blood vessel in his brain, a hereditary weakness in his heart that had never been discovered. It was the medical experts who would be able to discover the truth once the police had handed the case over to them.

  Louise registered what he was saying, but something immediately started to nag away inside her. There was something wrong. Henrik was talking to her, even though he was dead. He was urging her to be careful and watchful.

  It was dawn by the time Göran Wrath stood up and left. Artur had asked to be left alone with Louise. He lifted his daughter onto the bed, then lay down beside her and held her hand.

  She suddenly sat up. Now she had understood what Henrik had been trying to tell her.

  'He never slept in pyjamas.'

  Artur got off the bed and stood beside it.

  'I don't follow you.'

  'The police said that Henrik was wearing pyjamas. I know that he never wore pyjamas. He owned a few pairs, but he never wore them.'

  Artur stared uncomprehendingly at her.

  'He always slept naked,' she said. 'I'm certain. He told me that he always slept with nothing on. It started when he used to sleep in front of an open window, in order to toughen himself up.'

  'I don't think I understand what you're getting at.'

  'Somebody must have killed him.'

  She could see that Artur didn't believe her. There was no point in going on. She didn't have the strength. She would have to wait.

  Artur sat down on the edge of the bed.

  'We must get in touch with Aron,' he said.

  'Why do we have to talk to him?'

  'He was Henrik's father.'

  'Aron has never bothered about him. He's gone away. This has nothing to do with him.'

  'But he has to know, even so.'

  'Why?'

  'It's just the way it is.'

  She wanted to protest, but he took her by the arm.

  'Did you really have no contact with each other?'

  'No.'

  'None at all?'

  'He rang occasionally. And wrote the odd letter.'

  'You must know where he lives, roughly?'

  'Australia.'

  'Is that all you know? Where in Australia?'

  'I don't even know for sure if it is Australia. He was always digging new burrows, which he abandoned when he felt threatened. He was like a fox that never left a forwarding address.'

  'It must be possible to find him. Don't you know whereabouts in Australia?'

  'No. He wrote once that he wanted to live close to the sea.'

  'Australia is surrounded by sea.'

  He said nothing more about Aron. But she knew that Artur would never give up until he had done everything possible to find him.

  She occasionally dozed off, and when she woke up he was always by her side. Sometimes he made a phone call, or spoke quietly to one of the police officers. She was no longer listening, exhaustion had reduced her consciousness to a point where she could no longer distinguish any details. The only thing that existed now was pain, and the never-ending nightmare that refused to release its grip on her.

  She had no idea how much time had passed when Artur said they ought to go up to Härjedalen. In any case, she offered no resistance but accompanied him to the car he had rented. They drove north in silence. He had chosen to take the coastal road, not the meandering inland route he usually preferred. They passed by Ljusdal, Järvsö and Ljusnan. As they passed Kolsätt, he suddenly informed her that there used to be a ferry there. Before the bridges were built, you had to take a ferry over the mighty river in order to reach Härjedalen.

  The autumn colours were sharp. She sat in the back seat, staring at the display of colour. She was asleep when they reached their destination, and he carried her into the house and laid her down.

  He sat beside where she was lying on the red sofa that was patched and mended and had always been in that very spot.

  'I know,' she said. 'I've known all along. I'm certain. Somebody killed him. Somebody killed him, and me as well.'

  'You are alive,' Artur said. 'You are very much alive.'

  She shook her head.

  'No,' she said. 'I'm not alive. I'm also dead. The person you see is not me. I don't know yet who it is. But everything is different now. And Henrik did not die a natural death.'

  She stood up and walked over to the window. It was dark. The street light outside the gate shone dully and was swinging back and forth in the wind. She could see her face mirrored in the window. She had always looked like that. Dark, medium-length hair, centre parting. Blue eyes, narrow lips. Even if everything inside her had changed, her face was the same.

  She gazed into her own eyes.

  Inside her, time had started to pass once more.

  CHAPTER 4

  As dawn broke, Artur took her out into the woods with him. The air was filled with the smell of moss and damp bark, the sky hidden by mist. The first frost had arrived, the ground creaked under their feet.

  During the night Louise had woken up and gone to the toilet. As she passed a half-open door she saw Artur in his old armchair, its springs almost touching the floor. He had an unlit pipe in his hand – he had stopped smoking some years previously, abruptly, as if it had struck him that he had used up his lifetime ration of tobacco. She paused and observed him, and it seemed to her that this was how she had always experienced him. No matter what her age, she had always stood outside a half-open door and observed him, assuring herself that he was there, standing guard over her.

  He had woken her up early,
gave her no chance to protest but insisted that she should dress for a walk in the forest. They drove over the bridge in silence and turned northwards, following the river towards the mountains. The tyres produced a crackling noise, the forest was motionless. He stopped on a logging road and put his arm round her shoulders. Barely visible paths meandered in all directions into the trees. He chose one of them, and they entered the vast silence. They came to an area where the ground was uneven, covered in pine trees. This was his gallery. They were surrounded by his sculptures. Carved out of the trunks were faces, bodies, trying to release themselves from the hard timber. Some trees had many bodies and faces intertwined, others had only one small face, often several metres above the ground. He created his works of art both on his knees and perched on primitive stepladders he had cobbled together. Some of the sculptures were very old. He had made those over forty years ago, when he was young. As the trees grew, they had distorted the images, changed bodies and faces, just as people change as they grow older. Some sculptures had burst, heads were shattered, as if they had been crushed or decapitated. He told her that sometimes people would come here during the night, saw out his sculptures and take them away with them. Once, a whole tree had vanished. But he did not worry, he owned twenty hectares of pine forest and that would be enough for his life and quite a lot more besides. Nobody would be able to steal everything he carved for his own pleasure, and for those who wanted to see them.

  He eyed her surreptitiously, looking for any signs that she was disintegrating. But she was still drowsy from the strong tablets, he was not even sure that she noticed the faces peering at her from the tree trunks.

  He took her to his holy of holies, three big pine trees growing close together. Brothers, he had thought; brothers or sisters who could not be separated. He had spent a long time contemplating these trees, hesitating for many years. Every sculpture existed inside the trunk, but he had to wait for the moment when he saw the invisible. Then he could sharpen his knives and chisels and start work, exposing what already existed. But those three mighty pines had remained silent. Sometimes he thought he might have caught a glimpse of what was hidden under the bark. But then he hesitated, it wasn't quite right, he needed to look deeper. One night he had dreamed about solitary dogs, and when he came back to the forest he had realised that it was animals inside those pine trunks – not really dogs, but something between a dog and a wolf, or perhaps a lynx. He had started carving, he no longer had any doubts, and now there were three animals there, each of them both dog and cat, seeming to climb up the massive trunks, as if they were climbing out of themselves.

  She had never seen the animals before. He watched her, saw her searching for the story. His sculptures were not images but stories, voices whispering and shouting and urging her to listen. His gallery and her archaeological digs had the same roots. They were voices that had disappeared, and she was the one who had to interpret the silence they emitted.

  'Silence has the loveliest voice,' he had said once. She had never forgotten those words.

  'Do they have names, these dogcats of yours, or catdogs?'

  'The only name I'm satisfied with is yours.'

  They penetrated deeper into the forest, paths crisscrossed, birds took off and fluttered away. Suddenly – it was not his intention – they found themselves in the hollow where he had carved Heidi's face. The sorrow he still felt weighed heavily down on him. Every year he carved her face and his sorrow anew. Her face became more and more frail, more elusive. The sorrow delved deeper and deeper into the trunk as he dug his chisel into himself as much as into the tree.

  Louise caressed her mother's face with the tips of her fingers. Heidi, Artur's wife and Louise's mother. She continued stroking the damp tree. A strip of resin had stiffened over her eyebrows, as if Heidi had a scar on her face.

  He knew that Louise wanted him to speak. So much had remained unsaid about Heidi. They had pussyfooted around each other all these years, and he had never been able to bring himself to tell her what he knew, and at least some of what he didn't know, but suspected.

  It was forty-seven years since Heidi had died. Louise was six at the time, and Artur had been up in the forest logging, at the foot of the mountains. Nobody could know what Heidi had been thinking, but she was certainly unaware she was about to die when she had asked her neighbour, Rut, if the girl could spend the night at her place while she went out to do what she loved doing more than anything else: skating. The fact that it was minus nineteen degrees did not worry her: she set off with her kick-sledge without telling Rut that she was going to the tarn known as Undertjärn.

  What happened next could only be surmised. Having arrived at the tarn with her sledge, she strapped on her skates and ventured out onto the black ice. It was almost full moon, otherwise it would have been too dark for skating. Somewhere out there on the darkness she had fallen and broken her leg. When they found her two days later, she was curled up in the foetal position. The sharp blades of her skates looked like strange talons on her feet, and they had considerable difficulty in working her cheek free from the ice.

  There had been many unanswered questions. Had she cried for help? What had she shouted? To whom? Had she appealed to some god or other when it became clear that she was going to freeze to death?

  Nobody could be blamed, apart from herself who had not said that she was going to Undertjärn. The locals had searched the Vändsjön lake, but it was not until they had contacted Artur and he had come home that he suggested she might have gone to the tarn where she used to go swimming in the summer.

  Artur did everything he could to protect Louise from the horror of it all when she was a child. Everybody in the village had done their bit to help, but nobody could keep the sorrow at bay. It was like wisps of smoke, or little mice seeking refuge in the autumn: it penetrated everywhere, no matter how well protected a space might be.

  Sorrow was like mice, it always found a way in.

  For a year she had slept in his bed every night – that was the only way she could cope with the dark. They had looked at photographs of Heidi, laid a place for her at table, and sworn that they would always be a threesome, even if only two of them turned up for meals. Artur had tried to learn how to cook like Heidi: he had never managed it, but young though she was, Louise thought she had understood what Artur was trying to do for her.

  They grew up together over subsequent years. He continued his work as a lumberjack, devoting the little time he had over to his sculptures. There were those who thought he was mad, and unsuitable for taking care of the girl. But as he was polite and never got into fights or swore, he was allowed to keep her.

  But now Heidi, the German, was by their side once more. And Henrik had passed away, the grandchild Heidi had never seen.

  One death was linked with the other. Did it help, did anything become comprehensible by staring into one black mirror in the hope of seeing something constructive in the other?

  Death was darkness, there was no light to be found there. Death was attics and cellars, it smelled raw, of mice and soil, and loneliness.

  'I don't really know anything at all about her,' said Louise, shuddering in the early-morning air.

  'It was a sort of fairy tale,' he said. 'Fate steered her into my path.'

  'Didn't it have something to do with America? Something I've never really understood? Something you've never told me?'

  They began walking along the path. The faces carved in the tree trunks kept watch over them. He started talking, and he tried to present himself as Artur, not as her father. He was the narrator now, and he would try to tell the story as accurately as he possibly could. If he could divert her attention from Henrik, even for a short time, he would have achieved something worthwhile.